For about 6 months I’ve been considering buying a new laptop. I do most of my production work on a G5 tower, but I don’t really have a good mobile solution. I do have a laptop… it’s the original G4 Titanium Powerbook. It’s painfully slow to work on because it’s a mere 500MHz, with a dinky 8MB video card, and 20GB hard drive. It originally shipped with OS9 on it. Installing Tiger, and my apps took up most of the hard drive. It works, but I hated working on it.
A while back I decided I wanted an iBook, instead of another Powerbook, because I wanted the durability. Powerbooks are a bit delicate.
Lately, there has been rumors flying around that Apple may introduce the new Intel-based iBooks as early as January. I don’t know if this is going to happen or not, but it worried me a little. I don’t want one of the first Intel iBooks. I’m usually an early adopter, but this is a significant change in architecture. There are bound to be some hiccups with the first models to come off the line. I was also a little concerned about applications. They all need to be recompiled for Intel processors. Power PC apps will run in the Intel machines, but they’ll be under Rosetta (emulation). Running processor intensive apps under Rosetta is going to be a little slow, especially on lower-end machines. I don’t want to have to worry about that, and I don’t want to buy all new apps.
Last Friday, Apple had a Black Friday (1 day only) sale. They were offering $101 off iBooks, plus free shipping. I debated on buying it all day. Finally at 11:56pm I decided to go for it. I jumped online and bought the 12″ model (I wanted small) with 100GB HD and 1GB of RAM.
My online order technically registered with the Apple server at 12:04am (Saturday). Although my web receipt showed the discount, the email confirmation did not… because the sale had been over for 4 minutes. Luckily, I called Apple the next day and told them what happened, and they put the discount back in. :)
My order confirmation said the iBook would ship on December 2nd, but I got a happy surprise email from Apple saying it had shipped early, on the 29th. Surprisingly, it’s coming from China. I had no idea they were made in China.
Now I’m just waiting for it to arrive (I can’t wait), and hoping that Apple doesn’t introduce cool new, non-Intel, iBooks in January. That would suck!
Yup, they all come from overseas – usually. My 12″ PB cam from Taiwan to southern-Ontario Canada in just two days.
Enjoy!
*Jealous* enjoy that 100gb HD there Paul :).
I’m still using my 4 year old G3 iBook 500Mhz. And it still looks as good as the day I bought it. I increased the memory to 640MB when tiger came out. And it continues to speed up with every update. Which is interesting as it appears that the operating system is using less Altivec instructions (a G4 advantage) than before.
Honestly, I don’t want the intel in my ibook. I think you made a good choice.
You won’t have any regrets. I’m a stundent on a three year old iBook, and it’s been really great to me. I’m actually able to manage some design and grapics work off of it without slowing it down, plus the portability and durability of the 12″ model has been perfect for my lifestyle.
Oo I am jealous too. I’m dying to buy a new iBook. You’ve brought up a good point about the Intel quircks. I was thinking of getting one ASAP but probably all of those little utils that you rely on everyday from people who just make them on the side might not release Intel versions for months…so it is a tricky decision. But Apple’s pretty good at stuff, and I’m sure Rosetta will do a good job.
I just thought I’d mention my iPod w/color also came from Shanghai -> Ontario ->Edmonton. That FedEx tracking brings back memories… :D